It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a skyscraper? Not exactly. The object passing by Earth on Friday is actually an asteroid as wide as the height of the Empire State Building.
Dubbed 2008 OS7 after its discovery in 2008, the space rock is between 210 meters and 480 meters across, according to estimates by NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies.
It has been classified as a "Near Earth Object" (NEO) and a "Potentially Hazardous Asteroid" (PHA) because of its size and proximity to Earth. NEOs are classified as objects within 48 million kilometers of Earth, and 31,000 solar system objects fall into this category. PHAs usually pass Earth within 7.4 million kilometers.
"We don't need to worry about it too much as this asteroid will not enter Earth's atmosphere, while this will still approach close to the Earth. There are more than millions of asteroids in our Solar System, of which ~2,350 asteroids have been classified as PHAs,” Minjae Kim, a research fellow at the University of Warwick, told Newsweek.
For those wanting to catch a look, the asteroid will be quite hard to spot. It will pass as close as 2.7 million kilometers from Earth on Friday afternoon at a speed of about 18.2 kilometers per second according to Newsweek. That is more than seven times as far away as the moon and around 40 times faster than a fighter jet.
The asteroid will not be back by Earth until 2032, when it will be farther away, at about 72 million kilometers.
2008 OS7 is only one of several asteroids passing Earth this week. On Friday and Saturday, several more asteroids will whiz by without incident, however, these rocky objects will be no more than tens of meters across.
Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press.
